Marieke Vollebergh

In 2007, I started my PhD research at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) with the research question of whether DNA characteristics could predict sensitivity to certain types of chemotherapy.

Since the summer of 2019, I have been working as an internist-oncologist and I am involved in the care of patients with gastroenterology and liver cancer; and more specifically patients with esophageal, gastric and metastatic colon cancer.

In addition, I am involved in the development of oncological drugs that are applied in a study context, in the early phase of development. Usually this research is what focuses on the safety and finding the right dosage of new cancer drugs. Increasingly, these new drugs are very specific to certain errors in DNA or proteins of the cancer, so hopefully more and more will be possible in terms of the right treatment for an individual patient. Being able to apply innovative knowledge (down to the smallest level in a cell) from scientific research, partly from the Netherlands Cancer Institute itself, makes working at the NKI special and challenging for me.